Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

this is a Danish survey showing that the last book male readers read was in 80% of the cases written by a male author (19% female, 1% non-binary) whereas last book read by female readers was in 54% of the cases written by a female author, 44% male, 3% non-binary
https://kum.dk/fileadmin/_kum/1_Nyheder_og_presse/2023/Rapport_Laesning-i-forandring_FEB_TG.pdf

― corrs unplugged, Monday, 24 April 2023 bookmarkflaglink

This is what I suspect as the case.

Just now through twitter and seeing a couple of tweets I have been reminded of four men who: talked about a short story published recently, a book they published in the past, a book they are to publish in future and one person who is getting a book published but are way overdue because reasons. None are names, all randoms.

Obviously this is all through book twitter but publishing your own writing is a bit of a niche activity anyway(?), so wonder if it's an actual issue.

Most women I know who read a lot do say they tend to prefer female writers but hegemony being what it is they prob still end up reading more men than most men read women.

There certainly are already a lot of books

Perhaps still more books than shows, as unlikely as that sounds.

I don't mean to view the days of literary rock stars through rose-tinted glasses. In lots of ways that world sucked. That world of big-time book critics, literary publishers and authors seemed very clubby. Lots of mediocre work was championed and there was more than a hint of sexism in some of the attitudes. But on the other hand, maybe having that clubby world controlling book review sections in major periodicals and newspapers at least allowed some critical mass to coalesce around certain authors and books, enough to cross them over to a wider mainstream audience and get people interested in literature who otherwise might not have given it the time of day. Those hyper-masculine literary lions were caricatures in some respects, but at least they had an appeal that extended beyond ivory-tower eggheads and hoity-toity rich folks. We can indulge some nostalgia for those dinosaurs even while admitting their kind will probably not walk the earth again.

So…it was like the recording industry?

To me at least it seemed like a smaller world than the recording industry was.

Many authors write with just enough racial awareness to flatter their readers into thinking they’ve read something bold and insightful, all the while avoiding any exploration of truths that would make both author and reader uncomfortable. It’s literature as lifestyle affirmation art.

(Back to Mr Palomar.)

the narrator is specifically talking about Asian-American writing, and gives several extremely specific and detailed examples xp

I don't think you can call something that starts with "many authors" a sweeping generalization, it's saying from the off that it's not everyone.

Many authors are saying…

Out of context, v. off-putting (incl. "Many"): made me cynical about that author's cynicism, re clickbait. Good to know there is more to it.

But would have to read all the authors cited, each in context, to see if the judgement seems fair.

(& think I'm gonna try to finish Mr. Palomar today, because it deserves more than my declining-toward-bedtime mind.)

I don't think we need rockstar male authors, but I think it's true that public literary reception has become increasingly moralistic and that sometimes that makes for less interesting work, I don't think Knausgaard would have published those books in the current atmosphere

but that goes for authors of any gender/ethnicity/sexuality, this article makes some good points imo:
_Many authors write with just enough racial awareness to flatter their readers into thinking they’ve read something bold and insightful, all the while avoiding any exploration of truths that would make both author and reader uncomfortable. It’s literature as lifestyle affirmation art._

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/06/asian-american-psycho🕸

All the big rockstar male authors are still in print, you can still read them if you want.

Yeah, they never seem to go out of print.

True, but on the other hand, I feel it would be difficult for a Philip Roth or John Updike to rise to the top these days. The "selfish misogynistic asshole describes his sexual/romantic life" genre does seem fairly done and dusted.

Growing up in the 80s, the whole phenomenon of quality paperbacks (Vintage Contemporaries, Vintage International, Penguin American, and so on) really gave a sense of quality and excitement to new books, the "rock star" energy mentioned above. And for sure there was Richard Ford and Barry Hannah, but there was Lorrie Moore and Ellen Gilchrist and so on as well.

Who else among us remembers the promotional blitzkrieg that launched The World According to Garp?

Sounds relevant.

MY BOOK IS OUT TODAYY ✨✨I loved writing this book and I hope you can feel that - it’s a project from my heart + hope it’s a valuable contribution to the conversation around housing, how it impacts every part of how we live and how we must make home a right for everyone ✨✨✨ pic.twitter.com/y21hBa8MdH

— kieranyates (@kieran_yates) April 27, 2023

Did you belong to QPB, Eazy? Quality Paperback Bookclub, for those of yall who missed it: trade pbs, quite a good variety, like omnibus editions of olde American authors coming back around (Dawn Powell!), also ones from other countries, fiction and nonfiction. A fair amount of erotica, believe it or not.
So I finished (read straight through, then back through some of)Mr. Palomar. I should read back through some more of the smooth, friendly, inexorable, guided tours, sunny lectures, really, of the perceptions and thought processes of Mr. P., a seemingly afternoon, middle-aged gentleman, trained to think in terms of prototypes and models, the rightness of principles, however much he actually knows or knows that he knows or believes about them---but now he wants to see things as they are, because that's what increasingly seems right.
He's a seeker of the everyday (cue" "At home he's a tourist"), getting down to basics in a spaced out way that can disappear into tiny details---my own mind blinks and misses some, I admit, but in short chapters that bump into invisible walls of the much valued world: "the surface of things," into and from which he means to peer, balancing on the window sill, but being seen, as also embraced, can be tricky: he walks past a topless sunbather several times, determined to thereby express just the right, rightest, most enlightened state of mind, until finally (you can guess the rest).
At the zoo, he gets too wrapped up in the implications of the apes---until his little daughter (he seems to be a late-life Dad), tired of the damn apes, pulls him toward the penguins, aieee-it's okay though, he needed some kind of change.
Which can be agreeable, like when he and his wife choose, or at least he does, to watch a gecko on the terrace window over TV: they or he can see the translucent gecko belly welcoming another bug, and even a butterfly.
The ugly nasty usual pigeon clouds over Rome get bumrushed by sparrows in late autumn---Mr. P. can find no adequate account for their behavior---forming, at one point, a wheeling word balloon of sparrows, the vessel of a vast fast message, comment of sparrows, so complex, but perhaps it can be read by someone or something (sparrows?)
But there's also an accruing sense, eventually spelled out in passing, of the limits, limited value and rightness of conjecture, of what he once took to be "supreme intellectual exercise," of words themselves yadda yadda I notice that the original Italian edition of this is copyright 1983, two years before the author died, and seems like he had some sense of that, falling further into place, in the comedy of thought, under the sun and moon and stars.

Sorry! Starlings, not sparrows!

Better late than never, I guess: 20 years after winning the Nobel and 29 years after its publication, the translation of Elfriede Jelinek's magnum opus Die Kinder der Toten is forthcoming at @YaleBooks ! pic.twitter.com/wQRogDXR5x

— Karl (@underreadgerman) September 12, 2023

I have been emailing YUP about this book since 2005-ish and developed rapport with people as they came & went from the job. I read an extract of this in a US publication, a scene with a bus crash; it was kind of classic Jelinek, hopeless and violent....I'm a fan, I"m excited for this

Is that extract online?

no, it was in a paper journal, a very small affair. I have it around here someplace but I am pretty disorganized, books in stacks all over the house & also at the office which is half an hour away (I suspect it's out there) -- the journal is/was called Dimension 2 and the editor was a good correspondent and I see from our correspondence that I promised to send him some stuff and I probably didn't, I'll remedy that today (six years late). It's in vol. 5 no. 3 -- I believe it's the prologue, I had originally heard it was the prologue & the epilogue but I don't recall the latter.

oh wait I did find a part of it online: here. still if you have space on your shelves it's so cool to get some obscure journal that just happens to have an excerpt from a book that won the Nobel but that most English readers can't be bothered about, fun book adventures imo

Excellent, hope it's not too tough to source in the UK.

Thank you, J Crawford, for the link. Shall read that soon.

Two more for the year:

- Jose Donoso. There is an incomplete version available in English:
https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-obscene-bird-of-night/

- Maria Gabriella Llansol in June: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/175403640-a-thousand-thoughts-in-flight

Cool!

At this time of so much—too much—death, I wrote about the unheeded politics of Elias Canetti‘s powerful posthumous text, The Book Against Death (translated by Peter Filkins & published by @NewDirections in English), for @thebafflermag: https://t.co/qQUudJG8bJ

— Sanders Isaac Bernstein (@Return2Sanders) August 13, 2024

Also have a copy of Children of the Dead so will be getting round to it in a couple of weeks

Looking good for Latin AM reissues:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/08/16/on-asturiass-men-of-maize/

https://www.nyrb.com/products/bomarzo

i thought this was pretty crazy. from a Granta article i read yesterday:

"The editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house recently told me that she believes there are about 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in America and publishing any novel of quality is a matter of getting that book to them by any means necessary."

https://granta.com/literature-without-literature

it didn't seem like that many people!

Agreed. Seems low.

the number is more likely several times that.

As a very rough proxy, the number of English degrees awarded per year seems to be about 50,000 (though falling every year)

https://datausa.io/profile/cip/english

Ha, there are plenty of English degree graduates who only read what they’re assigned and fuck all else.

maybe they meant people who are always buying new books. plenty of people probably only buy a handful of new lit fic books a year. some zeitgeisty ones. some bestsellers a la kingsolver.

Edwin Frank, the editor of New York Review Books, had that number at 50,000 around 2012, maybe it's gone down?

I interned at a large(r) indie publisher in 2012 (mostly nfic, but still) and the "big" authors usually had print runs b/w 10-20,000, rarely exceeding that. I'd imagine Fiction to generally have larger audiences but unfortunately prob not that much more.

That said, there are a lot of assumptions/presuppositions though w/ "serious", "consistent" and "literary" that gets you to that 20K number quoted above. I'd guess something like Rachel Kushner's new book out next week I'd guess a print run around b/w 35-50,000. Of course many people who read this stuff will get it via library, audiobook, ebook, borrow, etc.

https://ryanlanz.com/2024/01/31/who-else-wants-to-know-how-many-copies-novels-actually-sell/

also, this stuff pops up when i google:

"According to Electric Literature, novels published by traditional publishers typically sell between 2,000 and 40,000 copies, while novels published by independent small presses typically sell between 500 and 10,000 copies."

"In general, a book that sells more than 5,000 copies is considered successful in the publishing industry. For first-time authors, selling a few thousand copies may be considered a success, while well-established authors may need to sell hundreds of thousands of copies to be considered successful."

"One figure that often crops up is that the average traditionally published title can expect to sell 3,000 copies in its lifetime."

https://jerichowriters.com/average-book-sales-figures/

What about different kinds of nonfiction? Maybe I should say sold as nonfiction, though we all love a good story, however real it's supposed to be (thinking of the older people I know who say they read only self-help, biography, memoir, history [as in WWII etc]).

The publishing industry hates me with a passion. I read an average of a book a week, but I read at least 50 public library books or books I've bought used for every new book I buy.